Education burden reduction, family education investment, and education equity

How to effectively reduce the burden of students has received widespread attention in recent years. A series of burden reduction policies have been issued, yet there exists large dispute over the effectiveness of these policies. To assess the impact of the burden reduction policies, we construct a theoretical model and test its hypotheses with the constructed policy index and micro-level information from the CFPS dataset. We find that the burden reduction policies implemented during 2005-2018 were generally ineffective, but enlarged the difference in both family education investments and education output between students from high and low income families.